COLLINS: PIAA Needs To Study Where Competitive Gap Lies

BY DONNIE COLLINS, STAFF WRITERFebruary 24, 2019

Good idea: Fix the way high school championships are decided on the state level to make them as fair as possible for every student-athlete across the state. Bad idea: Assume the good idea can be attained with a one-line addendum to a 47-year-old state law that hardly begins to address the real issue. We should all have expected the “it’s about time” chorus being sung by so many since state Rep. Scott Conklin, D-Rush Twp., introduced legislation last week to allow the PIAA an opportunity to consider separate tournaments to determine champions for boundary- and nonboundary schools. If this legislation passes, the PIAA should do what isn’t going to be easy. Something that is best not just for the integrity of the state playoffs, but for every member institution: admit it wouldn’t work. “This is about safety. This is about fairness,” Conklin said at a Feb. 14 press conference to discuss the legislation in State College. “This is about giving an opportunity to every child. But what this doesn’t do is punish anybody.” That’s where he’s wrong. The misplaced blame Steve Jervis is one of those coaches who has talked about solutions for a while. He has been in the conference rooms when these types of rules are debated as a local representative to the Pennsylvania Scholastic Football Coaches Association. He had more potential solutions fly past his face than footballs, especially these last few years. “I think it’s all worth looking into,” Lackawanna Trail’s football coach said. “I just hope we’re not rushing this whole scenario.” Recruiting is a highly contentious issue in Pennsylvania. Most concur if the PIAA can do something to remedy a competitive gap it can create between boundary and nonboundary schools, it should. That said, it’s just as fair to study where that competitive gap actually lies. We see it around here, for sure. How often has Dunmore’s terrific girls basketball program had its state championship dreams ended at the hands of a program like Neumann-Goretti, a storied hoops program as aggressive on the recruiting trail as it is on defense? Valley View has had the best football program in the region in recent years, but incessant playoff meetings with Imhotep Charter, a Philadelphia program that can and does draw elite athletic talent throughout one of the nation’s largest cities, has frustrated the fan base. This season, Mid Valley’s boys basketball team went 18-4 and spent most of the season ranked in the top 5 of The Times-Tribune boys basketball poll. Once the District 2 Class 3A playoffs start, they had to beat one of the area’s two most powerful private schools, Holy Redeemer or Wyoming Seminary, just to earn a state playoff berth. Which, they didn’t. The last three times Mid Valley made the state tournament, a nonboundary school knocked it out. “For the purposes of playoffs and awarding championships, the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association shall establish separate playoff systems and championships for athletics for public schools and private schools admitted (to PIAA) in subsection (a),” Conklin’s proposed addendum reads. Seems great, on the surface, Just two things to remember, though. “If the public schools are worried about people recruiting, they have to understand that not all private schools recruit,” Scranton Prep football coach Terry Gallagher said. And, frankly, not all public schools don’t. The real problem This is not a convenient reality, but the fairness of the PIAA’s playoff structure is only really being tested by a handful of schools. Nonboundary schools won 64 percent of championships in boys basketball, and 59 percent of girls titles since 2008. In football, the boundary schools are more competitive, winning 22 of the 44 championships. But it doesn’t skew the broader numbers. Since nonboundary schools were allowed PIAA membership, they’ve won state championships 444 times. About 53 percent, though, were won by the same 19 schools. Neumann-Goretti has four straight girls state championships. Imhotep’s boys hoops team has six titles in all. In football, nonboundary schools won 17 state titles since 2013, but St. Joseph’s Prep and Archbishop Wood have four apiece, and Bishop Guilfoyle and Erie Cathedral Prep each have three. That’s 14 of those 17 shared by just four programs. So, the more pertinent question: Is this an issue with private schools? Or is the issue really with these particular private schools? Scranton Prep’s basketball team is annually one of the best in the state, but it’s not like the Cavaliers have had much playoff success against Imhotep. Conversely, Dunmore’s girls won all six of their regular-season games this season against nonboundary schools, by an average of 28.8 points. It’s not a question at all whether a good boundary school program is incapable of competing well against most private schools. If the PIAA splits the boundary and nonboundary schools into different tournaments, nonboundary schools that play to the spirit of the rules are going to get beat up on by ones that push the envelope. For sure, public schools that hit the transfer market will be beating the ones that play above board. Is that what the new rule is designed to promote? “My issue with some of it is, there are definitely schools in the state of Pennsylvania that give full scholarships. Full, athletic scholarships. There is no doubt about it,” Gallagher said. “If (state legislators and the PIAA) want to do it the right way, if they’re trying to make it fair to public schools because they can’t recruit and things like that, they should be fair to everybody. I mean, I don’t walk around recruiting, giving kids full scholarships.” It may never be celebrated in a big press conference, but Jervis offered a fair starting point. Basically, study the data on a sport-by-sport, classification-by-classification basis. Maybe a separate tournament for nonboundary schools works more fairly at the upper three classifications of the football playoffs than they do in the bottom three. Maybe, in basketball, it makes more sense to push nonboundary schools up a level or two come playoff time, depending on certain factors. The solution to these issues was never going to be as simple as creating more tournaments. In this case, it would lead to even more unfairness, perhaps even to a disastrous result that would delegitimize the playoff system altogether. DONNIE COLLINS is a sports columnist for The Times-Tribune. Contact him at dcollins@timesshamrock.com and follow him on Twitter @DonnieCollinsTT.